This post is all about my experience with my upgrade of my main desktop machine. It is also my main gaming machine so I will go over what to expect with the upgrade.

Well I am now several days into using Windows 7 RTM on both my main laptop and my main desktop machine. The plain install of Windows 7 on my laptop took just under 20 minutes and about 3 mandatory questions. The Upgrade took much longer. I must say though I am a power user. I have tons of apps on my machine and my Vista profile was around 100GB. The total time for the upgrade was around 2.5 hours.

These are main pieces of software I had on my machine before the in place upgrade from Vista 64 to Windows 7 64:

Office 2007

Adobe CS3 Suite

Adobe CS4 Suite

Nod32 Antivirus

CCleaner

7zip 64

NuSphere PHP

XAMPP

Windows Virtual PC

Windows Live Applications

Microsoft Live Mesh

Games:

Steam

Team Fortress 2

Left4dead

Fallout 3

Both Crysis’s

Starcraft and Warcraft 3

All Unreal Tournaments

Battlefield 2 and all the expansion packs

Call of Duty 2 – 5

All the applications worked just as they had under Vista. They retained all their settings and worked perfectly.

There have been a few hiccups if you can even call them that. The first time I booted into windows “Microsoft Mesh” would not connect. After the first reboot it worked fine. I also noticed that the first time I went to run Windows Live apps they ran the “First time configuration” wizard. Note I was never asked to enter any information . Just a window came up and went from 0 to 100%. The Application then opened up and all the preferences were all there.

The only roadblock that I hit was Virtual PC 2007 is not compatible with Windows 7. The new “Virtual PC” is now a Windows component in Windows. You do not have to go and download it. The new virtual PC had no clue that I had several Virtual machines created nor was there any easy way of importing them. The one thing I would have loved to see in the upgrade setup that tests for incompatible pieces of software that it could tell the person Virtual PC 2007 would not work.

As for speed, the machine has always been very fast. It now seems even more snappier then before. All the games feel very responsive as well.